▶︎ 0:00 Welcome to these lectures on the philosophy of personal identity. In some ways, this topic is a really easy one to investigate because it's really familiar. Questions of personal identity are raised frequently in day-to-day life. Most of us have thought about this question at some point. So it's not a difficult topic in that sense. But in another way, it is a really difficult topic because it's not a very straightforward question.
▶︎ 0:26 In everyday speech, when we think about the question of personal identity, we're usually thinking about the kind of identity that's at issue in what's come to be called, following Erik Erikson, an identity crisis. So we think of the adolescent who's raised in a very insular community, who goes off to the big city or goes off to university and is suddenly exposed to all kinds of new perspectives and ways of viewing the world and has to think about, what do I really value? What do I really believe? What do I really want?
▶︎ 1:01 Or we might think about a midlife crisis where somebody thinks, I've got the beautiful house in the suburbs, and I've got the successful career, but I feel dissatisfied. They remember the dreams of their childhood, and they wonder if they've forgotten who they were somewhere along the way of becoming an adult, and so they need to find out who they really are.
▶︎ 1:22 And in these cases, the way that we investigate this kind of question of personal identity is usually by some form of introspection or something that aids introspection. You might go on an Eat, Pray, Love tour, you might hike the Appalachian Trail, you might go to therapy, you might meditate, or you might just sit around and think hard about what it is that you really believe. But what we're trying to find out here through introspection is, what are the core commitments, desires, beliefs, values that make me, me? So that's a very important question of personal identity.
▶︎ 1:57 But there's a different question of personal identity, and in many ways a much more fundamental one, that's so much a part of our day-to-day lives that we don't even notice when we're asking and answering it. Almost all of our daily activities depend upon our ability to recognize individuals as the same person at different times and places.
▶︎ 2:18 When I go to pick up my child at daycare, I need to be able to recognize my child. I need to make sure that the child I pick up is the same one that I left off that morning. If I go to pay my friend back the money I owe her, I need to be able to recognize and identify my friend as the very same person who lent me the money. And when the police arrest someone for a crime, they are, we hope, trying to arrest the very person who committed the crime, the very same individual. So this is a question that's just about being able to recognize the same individual at different times and places.
▶︎ 2:54 And philosophers have addressed both kinds of questions over many millennia in one way or another. Currently, the identity crisis notion of identity or question of personal identity is mostly addressed in ethics or value theory or moral psychology. But what is most frequently called the problem of personal identity in current analytic philosophy is this latter, more fundamental question, and that's addressed by people who do metaphysics.
▶︎ 3:26 And this latter question asks, what must be true for me to be correct when I judge that the person that I'm paying back is the very same person that I borrowed the money from? Or what has to be true that I'm right that the child I'm picking up at daycare is the very one that I dropped off there? How do we know when we see people at two different times that we have one distinct individual and not two?
▶︎ 3:56 And this turns out to be a trickier question than you might think, given how readily we make these judgments every day, how confident we are in them, and how well they turn out. But trying to theorize it, trying to give a theoretical account of what it is we're getting right when we see that we've got one individual at two times turns out to be very tricky.
▶︎ 4:16 And I think that one of the reasons that it turns out to be very tricky is because as we address this more fundamental question, we do it with a sense that somehow it's connected to that identity crisis sense of identity, that that's somehow implicated in what it is that really makes someone the same person over time in this more fundamental sense. But it's not clear how they're connected. They're not the same question, but they're not entirely distinct. And so I think that every time we try to theorize this, that gets in the way.
▶︎ 4:51 In these lectures on personal identity, what I'm going to do is first, in the first two lectures, lay out the discussion of this more fundamental sense of personal identity as it's been going on recently in metaphysics. I'm going to talk about what question is being asked. I'm going to refine the question and make it more specific. And I'm going to look at the two major answers that have been proposed to this question, the psychological continuity theory and the bodily continuity theory, and look at their strengths and weaknesses.
▶︎ 5:28 After that, I'm going to pivot a little bit, and in the final lectures, I'm going to take a different approach to the question of personal identity, one that's developed recently, a narrative approach to personal identity, which seeks to try to capture the strengths of the two major positions and avoid some of their weaknesses. But of course, this being philosophy, has problems of its own. And having laid all that out, I think we'll be in a position to say something a little bit more about how these two different questions of personal identity are connected, and that will show a way forward.